| Empirical and experimental evidence shows that decision makers in reality are often not perfectly rational and that they exhibit behavioral choice patterns. However, much attention in the literature is paid toward an environment where decision makers are assumed to be fully rational, and many questions of interest in behavioral economics have been left unanswered. In the present essays, I shed light on behavioral decision makers and to address issues without the rationality assumption. The first chapter is devoted to studies of welfare criteria for behavioral decision makers, and I axiomatically propose a method of inferring welfare from observed preference relations. It is shown that applications of the propose method obtain intuitive welfare judgment for a variety of nontransitive preference models. Chapter 2 contributes to the literature by finding a rationalizability test for an individual decision maker in a collective choice setup. In particular, this test works even when the other agents follow arbitrary choice norms. In Chapter 3, we show that a decision maker may not make a single choice from all the finite choice sets while maintaining a continuity axiom. Not to be void of content, therefore, the choice theory must either relinquish the fundamental continuity property or allow for multi-valued choice correspondences. |
